Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Series Will Cost (At Least) $500 Million

We knew Amazon would pay a pretty penny to develop its own Lord of the RingsTV series, but they might as well raid Smaug’s lair. New estimates put the TV iteration of Middle Earth at $500 million (to start!), and all before Amazon has even assigned talent to the project.

It was previously suggested that a $250 million price tag for the rights alone could skyrocket as much as $1 billion when production costs were said and done, but new internal Amazon documents from Reuters have a (slightly) more conservative estimate. The $250 million rights figure is accurate, but “production and marketing could raise costs to $500 million or more for two seasons.” It gets worse, though. That number is triple what Amazon paid for two seasons of the now-flopping Man in the High Castle, and would thus “need to draw three times the number of Prime members” – over three million new subscribers to balance the cost.